From The Platform, a new quarterly publication by Anarchist Affinity. (issue 1), of which more here.

Michael Schmidt is an investigative journalist, an anarchist
theorist and a radical historian based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He
has been an active participant in the international anarchist milieu,
including the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front.
His major works include ‘Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism (2013,
AK Press) and, with Lucien van der Walt, ‘Black Flame: The Revolutionary
Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism’ (2009, AK Press).

In your recent book, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism
(AK Press, USA, 2013), you argue that anarchists have often failed to
draw insights from anarchist movements outside of Western Europe. What
lessons does the global history of anarchism have to offer those engaged
in struggle today?
The historical record shows that anarchism’s primary mass-
organisational strategy, syndicalism, is a remarkably coherent and
universalist set of theories and practices, despite the movement’s
grappling with a diverse set of circumstances. From the establishment of
the first non-white unions in South Africa and the first unions in
China, through to the resistance to fascism in Europe and Latin America –
the establishment of practical anarchist control of cities and regions,
sometimes ephemeral, sometimes longer lived in countries as diverse as
Macedonia (1903), Mexico (1911, 1915), Italy (1914, 1920), Portugal
(1918), Brazil (1918), Argentina (1919, 1922), arguably Nicaragua
(1927-1932), Ukraine (1917-1921), Manchuria (1929-1931), Paraguay
(1931), and Spain (1873/4, 1909, 1917, 1932/3, and 1936-1939).

The results of the historically-revealed universalism are vitally
important to any holistic understanding of anarchism/syndicalism:

Firstly, that the movement arose in the trade unions of the First
International, simultaneously in Mexico, Spain, Uruguay, and Egypt from
1868-1872 (in other words, it arose internationally, on four continents,
and was explicitly not the imposition of a European ideology);
Secondly, there is no such thing within the movement as “Third
World,” “Global Southern” or “Non-Western” anarchism, that is in any
core sense distinct from that in the “Global North”. Rather that they
are all of a feather; the movement was infinitely more dominant in most
of Latin America than in most of Europe. The movement today is often
more similar in strength to the historical movements in Vietnam,
Lebanon, India, Mozambique, Nigeria, Costa Rica, and Panama – so to look
to these movements as the “centre” of the ideology produces gross
distortions.

The lessons for anarchists and syndicalist from “the Rest” for “the
West” can actually be summed up by saying that the movement always was
and remains coherent because of its engagements with the abuse of power
at all levels.

How is anarchism still relevant in the world today? What do
anarchist ideas about strategy and tactics have to offer people active
in social movements today?

I’d say there are several ways in which anarchism is relevant today:
1) It provides the most comprehensive intersectoral critique of not
just capital and the state; but all forms of domination and exploitation
relating to class, gender, race, colour, ethnicity, creed, ability,
sexuality and so forth, implacably confronting grand public enemies such
as war-mongering imperialism and intimate ones such as patriarchy. It
is not the only ideology to do this, but is certainly the main
consistently freethinking socialist approach to such matters.

2) With 15 decades of militant action behind it, it provides a
toolkit of tried-and proven tactics for resistance in the direst of
circumstances, and, has often risen above those circumstances to
decentralise power to the people. These tactics include oppressed class
self-management, direct democracy, equality, mutual aid, and a range of
methods based in the conception that the means we use to resist
determine the nature of our outcomes. The global anti-capitalist
movement of today is heavily indebted to anarchist ethics and tactics
for its internal democracy, flexibility, and its humanity.

3) Strategically, we see these tactics as rooted in direct democracy,
equality, and horizontal confederalism (today called the “network of
networks”), in particular in the submission of specific
(self-constituted) anarchist organisations to the oversight of their
communities, which then engage in collective decision-making that is
consultative and responsible to those communities. It was the local
District Committees, Cultural Centres, Consumer Co-operatives, Modern
Schools, and Prisoner-support Groups during the Spanish Revolution that
linked the great CNT union confederation and its Iberian Anarchist
Federation (FAI) allies to the communities they worked within: the
militia that fought on the frontlines against fascism, and the unions
that produced all social wealth would have been rudderless and
anchorless without this crucial social layer to give them grounding and
direction. In order to have a social revolution of human scale, we
submit our actions to the real live humans of the society that we work
within: this is our vision of “socialism”.

In sum, anarchism’s “leaderless resistance” is about the ideas and
practices that offer communities tools for achieving their freedom, and
not about dominating that resistance. Anarchists ideally are fighting
for a free world, not an anarchist world, one in which even
conservatives will be freed of their statist, capitalist and social
bondage to discover new ways of living in community with the rest of us.

Is it important to advance anarchism explicitly? Or is it
enough to engage in social movements whose objectives we support without
adopting the anarchist label?

This is primarily a tactical question, because the approaches adopted
by anarchists have to be suited to the objective conditions of the
oppressed classes in the area in which they are active, and the specific
local cultures, histories, even prejudices of those they work
alongside. The proper meaning of “anarchist” as a democratic practice – a
practical, not utopian, one at that – of the oppressed classes clearly
needs to be rehabilitated in Australia and New Zealand. Just as the
Bulgarian syndicalists who built unions in the rural areas relied upon
ancient peasant traditions of mutual aid to locate syndicalist mutual
aid within an approachable framework, so you too must find a good match
for anarchism within your cultures. We, for example, have relied heavily
on traditional township forms of resistance to explain solidarity,
mutual aid, egalitarianism, and self-management.

Yet, it is also a
strategic question because in my opinion, where you have the
bourgeois-democratic freedoms to organise openly and without severe
repression, it is important to form an explicitly anarchist organisation
in order to act as:

a) a pole around which libertarian socialists, broadly speaking, can
orbit and to which they can gravitate organisationally – though it is
important to recognise that there can be more than one such pole; and
b) as a lodestar of clear, directly-democratic practice, offering
those who seek guidance a vibrant toolkit of time-tested practices with
which to defend the autonomy of the oppressed classes from those who
would exploit/oppress them.

It is the question of responsibility that compels us to nail our colours to the mast. This is for three reasons:

a) firstly, because we are not terrorists or criminals and we have
nothing to be ashamed about that requires hiding, even from our enemies
(we should be able to openly defend our democratic credentials before
mainstream politicians);
b) secondly, that by forming a formal organisation, people we
interact with are made aware that none of us are loose cannons but are
subject to the mandates of our organisation (with those mandates being
public, fair and explicit); and
c) lastly, but most importantly, that the communities we work within,
whether territorial (townships, cities, etc), or communities of
interest (unions, queer rights bodies, residents’ associations etc) know
that we are responsible to them, that our actions, positions and
strategies are consultative, collaborative, responsive and responsible
to those they may most immediately affect.

We’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Counter Power
Volume 2, Global Fire: 150 Fighting Years of Revolutionary Anarchism,
is there any news on when it will be released? What ground will you be
covering that people might not expect?

Global Fire is really a monstrous work: in research and writing for
close to 15 years now, it’s really an international organised labour
history over 150 years, tracing the organisational and ideological
lineages of anarchism/syndicalism in all parts of the world. We have a
lot to get right: we need to have a theory, at least, for why the French
syndicalist movement turned reformist during World War I, or why the
German revolutionary movement as a whole, both Marxist and anarchist,
collapsed over 1919-1923, paving the way for the Nazis. These are issues
of intense argument among historians, and we have to be able to back up
with sound argument our stance in every case, from the well-known, like
the Palmer Raids against the IWW in the USA in the wake of World War I,
to the fate of syndicalism in Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s, or of the
near-seizure of power in Chile by the syndicalists in 1956, and their
fate under the red regimes in Cuba, Bulgaria and China, or the white
regimes in Chile, South Korea, or Argentina.

We need to understand the
vectors of the anarchist idea in a holistic, transnational sense, but
have often been hampered by the narrowness of national(ist)
perspectives. Even within the Anarchist movement, histories have been
more anecdotal and partisan than truly balanced and rigorous
assessments, and have often been very disarticulated by language
differences. With lengthy delays incurred by us trying to make sure that
Global Fire is the best (in fact only) holistic international account
of the movement. You can be assured that Lucien is working on refining
the text, which if published in its current format would weigh in at a
whopping 1,000 pages, and that we have a pencilled-in release date for
2015, though perhaps 2016 is more realisable.

Stuart Christie, former political prisoner and radical publisher --2009

To use the metaphor of plant life, the seeds of anarchism have been around since time immemorial, but the plant itself—the ideas and the movement as we understand them today—first germinated in September 1869 during the fourth general congress of the First International in Basel, in Switzerland. They quickly began to spread, take root and bloom in towns, cities and villages across Europe, the Americas and, later, throughout Asia and into Africa. The most immediate manifestations of this were the Lyons uprising of September 1870 and the Paris Commune of March 1871.

The subsequent 138 years of the movement’s history have been characterised by egalitarian dreams, the pursuit of justice, and a never-ending propagandistic cultural and educational activity punctuated by violent and nonviolent direct actions, strikes, insurrections, and aborted and frustrated revolutions.

This anarchist presence in political and social life has not gone unnoticed. Since that first meeting in Basel, anarchists have acquired a reputation for honesty, integrity, selflessness, sacrifice, and struggle. Anarchism’s enemies, on the right and on the left, highlight, in contrast, the anarchists’ so-called “easy” recourse to assassinations and other dramatic headline-grabbing direct actions, with exaggerated, black-and-white images that have influenced historians, media commentators, and politicians.

Since those early days, the red and black flag of anarchism has been—and continues to be—followed by varied and wide sections of the population.

Some historians, such as the Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, believe this is something rather abnormal and atypical. “Normality,” in their view, is that the “scientific doctrine” the proletariat needed was Marxist “socialism”; what they found “abnormal” was the extent to which anarchism and its offshoot, syndicalism, had succeeded in putting down roots in some of the most industrial and modern cities in Europe, cities such as Barcelona, and elsewhere, working-class strongholds where Marxist and parliamentary socialism never achieved striking success. In fact, in electoral terms, of all the cities in Western Europe it was only in Germany that an influential mass socialist party managed to consolidate itself [at the time].

Anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are by no means “exceptional” or “extraordinary” phenomena in the history of political-social movements; it was only after the First World War with the co-option or seduction of “socialist” trade unionism and “socialist” parties into the parliamentary political system that—with the notable exceptions like Spain, Argentina, and Sweden—the influence of anti-political, anti-statist, and direct-action oriented revolutionary syndicalism began to fade elsewhere in the world.

Even though anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism have proved less stable and robust than anarchists could have hoped for—characterised as they have been by both chronological and geographical discontinuity—they nevertheless still bloom when and where least expected. Often disappearing from view and written off by historians such as George Woodcock, they then reappear, unannounced, with explosions of protest.

The present work, however, is neither obituary nor panegyric; it is the first of a two-volume critical analysis of the ongoing evolution of anarchist ideas and movements, the social project for freedom and how best to transform and organise a coercion-free future society based on the principles of communitarianism, direct democracy—and consistency between means and ends.

Nor is it an anthology of anarchist writings or a history of libertarian movements; it is an attempt to define anarchism within the framework of classical Marxism, economic liberalism, and the ideas of P. J. Proudhon, and assess the impact—or not—of these anarchist and syndicalist ideas, and rethink ways to implement these ideas and practices in the global economy of the twenty-first century.

The work is not only an invaluable reference source, it is thought-provoking, insightful and encyclopaedic in scope, synthesizing as it does, a global history of the movement and the ideas which drive it, while at the same time challenging, constructively, many commonly-held views and misconceptions about anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism.

** Stuart Christie is a Scottish anarchist journalist, writer, and translator, born in 1946, who has been active in the movement since the age of sixteen. Having hitchhiked into fascist Spain in 1964 with the intention of assassinating dictator Francisco Franco, Christie and accomplice Fernando Carballo Blanco were arrested. Christie was found in possession of explosives and faced grim execution by garrote, but he was freed three years later after an international campaign for his release by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre. Back in Britain, he helped reestablish the Anarchist Black Cross for the support of political prisoners in Spain and elsewhere—one of the movement’s longest-surviving initiatives—and the journal "Black Flag. " In 1972, he was acquitted of involvement in the Angry Brigade’s sabotage campaign after one of the longest criminal trials in British history. He went on to found Cienfuegos Press and later Christie Books, and remains an active militant contributing to the broader anarchist movement.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Stumbled across this, which has been moving through a series of networks and lists:

Jack Devon:‘Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism’
I came across ‘Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism’ quite by chance and I’m so glad I did; it’s one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve read in years.
The authors are a journalist and an academic, a winning combination because they’ve succeeded in combining sound scholarship with accessible prose to launch a bold, unflinching assault on the myth-making, obfuscation, disinformation and downright lies that have served to distort, discredit and obscure the immense contribution anarchism and syndicalism have made to the labour movement globally and to society at large.

Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt adopt a stance of sympathetic engagement; letting nothing pass without critical appraisal, yet their approach is nonetheless sympathetic to the broad anarchist tradition. The result is nothing short of an exhilerating read. I can’t wait to get my hands on volume two.

They begin with the demolition of faulty definitions of anarchism.
Paul Elzbacher’s influential ‘Anarchism: Exponents of the Anarchist Philosophy’ (1900) picked seven ‘recognised’ anarchist teachers: Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tucker and Tolstoy. His basic assumption was faulty. Godwin derived an antistatist stance from utilitarian principles of the 1790s, but that didn’t make him an anarchist. Stirner was an extreme individualist of the 1840s . Tolstoy was a Christian mystic and contemplative. Godwin and Tolstoy were ascetics, Stirner a libertine. Proudhon was a utopian, a proponent of mutualism. Tucker was a rationalist and an atheist. In other words, Elzbacher ended up with a selection of people with radically different ideas. No wonder he defined anarchism by the lowest common denominator: opposition to the state.

Matters were not improved by the self-serving myth-making of anarchists themselves, some of whom tried to establish the idea that anarchism had always existed in mankind, a phrase that even slipped into the 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica. The anarchist historian Max Nettlau suggested that the anarchist concept and principles could be found in ancient Greece as well as among scientific writers of the 18th century. In his classic ‘Anarcho-Syndicalism’, Rudolf Rocker said anarchist ideas were to be found in every period of known history. In 1944 George Woodcock found in Taoism the first anarchistic doctrine. If anarchism can encompass economic liberals, Marxists, radical Christians, Taoism, and more,‘ the authors write, ‘it is hardly surprising that the standard works on anarchism describe it as “incoherent”.’

Using a deductive method, the authors start from scratch in seeking to construct an accurate picture of anarchism.
‘The basic premise of all the anarchist arguments was a deep and fundamental commitment to individual freedom,’ they write. ‘For the anarchists, however, freedom could only exist, and be exercised, in society; equally, inegalitarian and hierarchical social structures made freedom impossible. It followed that the anarchist ideal was a society based on social and economic equality as well as self-management, in which individual freedom could truly exist.’

It was simply untrue to claim, as did E.H. Carr in his biography of Bakunin, that the key figure in anarchism was an extreme individualist influenced by Stirner. Bakunin envisaged freedom as a product of society, not a revolt against society by individuals. On the contrary, the struggle against extreme individualism was an essential part of the anarchist project. For the anarchist, duties and freedoms are inextricably linked.
So where does this take us?
Anarchism and syndicalism are born of the European Enlightenment; specifically, anarchism is rooted in the labour movement of the 1860s.

Anarchism can be said to be rational, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian, and opposed to capitalism and landlordism. For anarchists, the class system has been the fundamental obstacle to true individuality with the state seen as a defender of that class system, a centralised body that concentrates power in the hands of the minority ruling class.
‘The emancipation of the working class and peasantry required a radically different form of social organisation that maximised popular self-activity and self-management – and this was entirely at odds with the state,’ the authors say.

The early anarchists also rejected the classical Marxist strategy of using the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as a means to destroy class society. That would simply replace one ruling elite with another. ‘I am above all an absolute enemy of revolution by decrees,’ said Bakunin. ‘which derive from the idea of the revolutionary State, i.e., reaction disguised as revolution.’ The new regime would only become a class system as bad as any that preceded it.
Revolutionary ‘socialist’ governments, Bakunin and Kropotkin repeatedly said, would in fact be forms of state capitalism. The state ‘will then become the only banker, capitalist, organiser, and director of all national labour, and the distributor of its products,’ Bakunin said. How right he was!

For anarchists, the means shaped the ends. The classical Marxist notion that history was a trajectory, a straight line determined by economic production – regardless of what anyone thought, said or did – was crude determinism by anarchist standards. In the anarchist world view, there was a great deal more to life – and history – than productive forces. If history marched anywhere, it did so in fits and starts, and was affected by phenomena such as culture, religion and leisure
Anarchists also saw the struggle of the popular classes – the working class and peasantry – as the engine of change. For classical Marxists, the peasantry was dismissed as a declining class that would be absorbed by the spread of capitalism.

Opposed to Marxist notions of the ‘aristocracy of labour’, Bakunin maintained that only through the broadest possible class unity could the interests of the popular classes as a whole be defended.
Anarchists were strongly internationalist, seeing war simply as a means for ruling groups to compete with one another globally for raw materials and new markets. From the start the movement also embraced a strong feminist impulse and championed equal rights for women.

‘It is our view,’ the authors say,’that the term anarchism should be reserved for a particular rationalist and revolutionary form of libertarian socialism that emerged in the second half of the 19the century. Anarchism was against social and economic hierarchy as well as inequality – and specifically, capitalism, landlordism, and the state – and in favour of an international class struggle and revolution from below by a self-organised working class and peasantry in order to create a self-managed, socialist, and stateless social order. In this new order, individual freedom would be harmonised with communal obligations through cooperation, democratic decision making, and social and economic equality, and economic coordination would take place through federal forms…’

Just published, Alex Zukas's positive (but at times critical: see below) review praises Black Flame as a "a rich, provocative, and important study of anarchist history, theory, and practice." It is a "wide-ranging intellectual and political history that will surely stimulate debates about anarchist theory and practice." The authors "synthesize a vast amount of primary and secondary source material on anarchism, their points are easy to follow, their arguments are clearly stated, they address key debates within anarchist politics and anarchist scholarship, and they take clear positions on those debates which are likely to generate even more debate." It also fosters new work by raising a "host of issues for future research starting with most of its main arguments"

Zukas also provides a succinct summary of those "main arguments" which is worth reproducing for its clarity: "The main arguments of the book, all of which challenge widely held views about anarchist history, theory, and practice are (1) the anarchist tradition begins in the 1860s as a response to the rise of capitalism and the modern state and emerged with, and was part of, modern socialist and proletarian movements; (2) not all philosophies that are hostile to the state or promote individual freedom are anarchist because anarchism is the libertarian wing of socialism which seeks to collectivize and self-manage production and replace the modern state with international self-management; (3) historians need a global perspective to counter the pervasive idea of ‘Spanish exceptionalism’ because major mass anarchist movements developed outside Spain in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, and Uruguay and often constituted the majority of organized workers in those nations from 1895 to 1925; (4) anarchist ideas have internal coherence; (5) the politics of class struggle, counterpower, and counterculture are integral to anarchism and syndicalism; (6) anarchism has always been predominantly a modern urban working-class movement rather than a rural peasant movement; and (7) anarchist and syndicalist trends are central to comprehending the history of labor and the Left in much of the world."

While Zukas does not dispute any of these major claims, he does suggest that there is a tension in Black Flame between its "scholarly or academic agenda" and "polemics of a more partisan agenda that involves building a cohesive anarchist movement today." This (he claims) can lead the latter to sometimes "undermine" or "overshadow" the former, leading the book to have "mixed" results. His main examples of this apparent flaw are that 1) Black Flame does not pay adequate attention to overlaps within the "broad revolutionary Left" and its "permeable boundaries" (his main example here are the De Leonists) 2) it "exhibits a tendency toward a caricatured, tendentious, reified, and reductive view of Marxist politics by means of selective quotation and by reducing Marxism to Leninism (Stalinism, really)" 3) Black Flame
is critical of classical Marxism yet fails to provide much "critical
assessment of Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s key ideas."

Short response:
As with all reviews, there is much food for thought in the criticisms
provided; critique is not a threat to scholarship, but central to its
progress, and so, always welcome.

It is in the same spirit of engagement, then, that I will post this short (I was going to say "brief," but it grew in the telling) response.

I would suggest that Zukas's general claim that "partisan" concerns undermine "academic" claims is a bit overstated. As he points out, the mixed mode of scholarship and advocacy is in the best "tradition of a great deal of labor scholarship" and is "laudable"; it is only a problem if the "partisan" position weakens the "scholarly" quality.

But has Zukas shown this? Yes and no, no, and, last,yes but no...

1)Yes and no:Black Flame focuses on the core of the anarchist and syndicalist tradition, and not on the overlaps and syntheses that emerged at its boundaries. So, yes, the issue of fuzzy boundaries is not central to its project and while it certainly merits more discussion, it is a matter for another project. This focus is not an example of partisanship undermining scholarship, but simply an issue of coverage.

It should also be noted that, within this necessary limitation, Black Flame does in fact discuss a number of examples of such overlaps and syntheses, among them the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa, the 1920s-1930s Sandino movement, and the impact of nationalism upon a wing of the Korean and Chinese anarchists.

The issue of De Leonism is quite separate, however, from this matter. Black Flame specifically, and at some length, rejects the view that De Leonism is an example of a synthesis or overlap. The correctness of that argument can be disputed, but it is a separate matter to the question of the importance of examining "permeable boundaries," since the case for De Leonism being an expression of blending at the boundaries must first be made.

Last on this point: as the points about Sandino etal underline, there have always been "permeable boundaries" on the "broad revolutionary Left," and indeed, between that Left and a range of other forces - not all revolutionary, and not all Left. That some permeability exists is undeniable, but this it is at the boundaries that exist between traditions; the fact of permeability does not efface very real, fundamental differences, and to identify those differences is not partisan, but a necessary part of scholarly analysis.

Nor should permeability on the "broad revolutionary Left" be overstated. Such matters such as the 1872 split in the First International, the systematic drive to purge anarchists and syndicalists from the Second and Third Internationals, the repression that was meted out by Marxists against anarchists and syndicalists in Russia, Korea, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Cuba and elsewhere is certainly not the whole history of the "broad revolutionary Left," but they are an enormous part of that history.

That said, the issue of overlaps and syntheses is an important one, deserving of more attention in its own right. So, with the reservations expressed above, that point is taken.

2) No:Black Flame does not provide a "caricatured, tendentious, reified, and
reductive view of Marxist politics" by "selective quotation" and
"reducing Marxism to Leninism (Stalinism, really)."

As we have argued in Black Flame and elsewhere, Marxism is not homogenous; it includes, indeed, a libertarian wing closely akin to anarchism.

Zukas notes this nuanced approach, but then wishes to suggest that Black Flame caricatures Marxism with a
"reductive view" based on "selective quotation" and stressing "Leninism (Stalinism, really)."

The problem with Zukas's point is that the dominant tradition in Marxism has always been statist; the history of countries like the Soviet Union etc., and of the big parties of the Second and Third Internationals (and the smaller but sometimes pretty substantial parties of the Fourth) is not just a minor moment in Marxism, but the bulk of its history. That is the Marxist tradition that most Marxists have always embraced, and that is why that tradition (explicit) forms the focus of Black Flame in discussing Marxism.

Therefore, quoting Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and Guevara is not really being "reductive" or "selective," but instead, being representative and reasonable; the same applies to linking "Marxism to Leninism (Stalinism, really)." One may not like "Stalinism," after all, but it would be a caricature of Marxism as a mode of thought stressing material realities, if one was to discuss Marxist politics as if the Soviet Union or "Stalinism" never existed.

3) Yes, but no: it is quite true that Black Flame does not provide a detailed criticism of Bakunin's and Kropotkin's "key ideas," but that was not its aim; the aim was, first and foremost, recovery of those core ideas, and of their expression in a revolutionary praxis internationally.

The critical discussion of classical Marxism presented in Black Flame is, by the same token, primarily about recovering the anarchist and syndicalist critique of classical Marxism and its analytical and political alternative to classical Marxism. Likewise, Black Flame provides a critical evaluation of many of the major debates and disputes within the broad anarchist tradition, in order to better understand that tradition's ideas and historical record.

To put this another way: revisiting the anarchist/ Marxist debate, and recapitulating, in all its force, the anarchist and syndicalist critique of many fundamental Marxist positions is a necessary method for examining real, fundamental
differences; it is not partisan, so long as the account is fair. And as suggested above, Black Flame provides a fair account of the dominant Marxist positions.

A critical assessment of the "key ideas" of Bakunin and Kropotkin on their own terms, and in place of the caricatures that bedevil the literature, is long overdue, and welcome. However, that task, too, falls beyond the scope of Black Flame.

In closing here, again the point is taken - as indicating an issue deserving of more attention in its own right - but with with reservations.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lucien van der Walt has published widely on labour and left
history, political economy, and anarchism and syndicalism, and is
involved in union education and working class movements. His books include works (with Michael Schmidt) Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (2009), (with Steve Hirsch) the edited Anarchism and
Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1880-1940: The
Praxis of Class Struggle, National Liberation and Social
Revolution (2010, 2014) and Negro E Vermelho: Anarquismo, sindicalismo revolucionário e pessoas de cor na África Meridional nas décadas de 1880 a 1920 (2014). His research engages the anarchist/ syndicalist tradition of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin; trade unionism, particularly in southern Africa; and neo-liberal state restructuring. Born in the mining town of Krugersdorp, he has a working-class family background.